Bima language

Bima
Bimanese
Nggahi Mbojo
Mbojo Script (Aksara Mbojo) in Bima (Mbojo script variant)
Pronunciation[ᵑɡa.hi ᵐbo.d͡ʒo]
Native toIndonesia
RegionSumbawa
EthnicityBimanese, Dompu
Native speakers
(500,000 cited 1989)
Austronesian
Dialects
  • Bima
  • Dompu
  • Donggo
  • Kolo
  • Mbojo
  • Sangar (Sanggar)
  • Toloweri
Latin alphabet (Bimanese Latin alphabet)
Lontara script (Mbojo variant)
Official status
Regulated byBadan Pengembangan dan Pembinaan Bahasa
Language codes
ISO 639-3bhp
Glottologbima1247
ELPBima
  Bima is spoken by the majority of the population or as their mother language
   Bima is spoken by the majority of the population, but also concurrently by a large number of speakers of other languages
   Bima is a minority language

Bima (endonym: Nggahi Mbojo [ᵑɡa.hi ᵐbo.d͡ʒo]), or Bimanese, is an Austronesian language spoken on the eastern half of Sumbawa Island, Indonesia by the Bimanese people, which it shares with speakers of the Sumbawa language. Bima territory includes the Sanggar Peninsula, where the extinct Papuan language, Tambora, was once spoken. Bima is an exonym; the autochthonous name for the territory is Mbojo and the language is referred to as Nggahi Mbojo. There are over half a million Bima speakers. Neither the Bima nor the Sumbawa people have alphabets of their own for they use the alphabets of the Bugis and the Malay language indifferently.